Built Like a Moth
by HotPinkCoffee
Summary: Four scenes, split into five parts, exploring Howard and Orc's relationship. Spoilers for Plague. Rated T for swearing, drug and alcohol use, and discussion of mature themes. Part four of five, 'Mouth', now up.
1. Bruise

**Built Like a Moth**

-/-

Author's Note:

I've always wondered how a romantic relationship between these two would go. I've written them as platonic before, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. Reviews appreciated.

-/-

**Bruise**

-/-

-/-

"This whole thing depends on amnesia and magnets." –Dessa Darling, _Matches to Paper Dolls_

-/-

For the first night in months, Howard wasn't listening to sobbing and screaming as he tried to sleep.

Not that that meant quiet; outside the tent was the rustle of kids moving into their new homes, the clunking sounds of inexperienced teenaged boatmen ramming their vessels into the docks, the occasional cheerful yelp of a toddler playing in the dark water, and the sounds of vomiting from dehydrated idiots who'd reached the lake and overindulged. Inside the tent, Orc was breathing over the roof of his mouth, an endeavor Howard would have sworn was spitefully noisy if Orc were awake. And somewhere in the distance, coyotes were calling to reassemble.

The tent itself was built for two people, but Orc could have taken up the space on his own. Howard had resigned himself to pressing and wriggling up against the side only because he knew better than to try and find someone willing to pity him enough to share a bed, and it was too cold for him to reasonably sleep on his own. Besides, Drake and Brittney were still somewhere out in the woods, and despite everything, or maybe because of everything, Howard knew Orc was still his best chance at being defended.

Howard's nose was bleeding. Again.

He snorted and only succeeded in spraying bloody mucus down to his mouth. After licking some of it off his lips, he snaked an arm up out of his sleeping bag and smeared the rest on the nylon corner. His face hurt. Not as badly as it did yesterday, not the sharp sting of a freshly-broken nose, but the tired ache that settled in after a day of squinting and face-rubbing and crying on top of a day-old broken nose. A glimpse of his face in the reflection of one of the tentpoles earlier in the day had confirmed his suspicions; a blotchy grey and purple tint had spread like algae from under the inside corners of his eyes to around his nostrils. Not a bad bruise, but a noticeable one nonetheless.

He repositioned himself in the sleeping bag, covering his injured face with fabric and warming his chin with his own breath. This new pose left the back of his neck and his shoulders cold, but that was life.

Drake and Brittney's cacophony might have been difficult to sleep through, but at least it was a single intrusion into the night, the metaphorical car alarm of crazy blaring into the night. This night, the sheer variety and unpredictability of the noises were possibly even worse. Every one of the many footsteps clumping through the forest undergrowth could be an unknown threat, rather than an identified and managed danger tied up in the basement. Every delighted squeal and splash sounded too much like a warning cry. Howard entertained fantasies of wringing the throats of every happy child out there, or at least delivering a curfew and a lecture to the lot of them, an oration on Stop Being Happy and Shut the Fuck Up. At gunpoint.

Orc's hand was on his shoulder.

"What do you want?" His tone was acidic enough to stain paper.

"You're cold."

"That's because it's a cold night." '_Moron_' was tacked onto the end of that statement, if unspoken.

For several seconds, Orc didn't say anything, and Howard hoped he'd gone back to sleep or passed out again.

"I said I'm sorry," Orc finally said.

"And I said 'okay'. Now go to sleep."

"I meant it."

"I know you did."

Orc squeezed Howard's shoulder, just a little. It was a gentle enough to be surprising from a boy who could split someone's skull with a tap. Howard cringed as if Orc's fingers were made of needles and sandpaper.

"Don't touch me."

"You're all cold."

"I said don't fucking touch me, alright?" Howard squirmed and wrested himself away from Orc's grip, feeling suddenly trapped in the small tent and the pitch black. He scrambled out of the sleeping bag and slipped on an empty bottle of something. The wall of the tent made poor support and he slid onto his knees, somewhere around Orc's head but he couldn't tell where. The bottle clanged against something, probably Orc's arm.

"Where you going?"

Howard didn't respond. He just fumbled for the zipper on the tent door and walked out.

It wasn't as crushingly dark outside. A few kids had set up firepits, and while the dim burn of the fires wasn't enough to change the ground from a black morass of things to trip on, it did provide a general idea of where people had set up their camps. Looking up, Howard realized the trees against the sky were still inky black against inkier black, but at least he knew where the trees were enough that he wouldn't walk into them.

Unfortunately, it was also colder outside the tent. Howard's hands already felt like they were all knucklebones. Taking careful steps, he started to make his way towards the nearest campfire when someone jabbed a hot flashlight beam into his face.

"Jesus!"

"Something going on out here?"

Howard blinked and rubbed his palms over the sore patches of skin around his eyes. "Dekka?"

Dekka lowered the flashlight beam a hair, although Howard knew full well that she was keeping it aimed at his face on purpose. "What are you doing out?"

"Didn't realize I was under house arrest. Tent arrest."

"I heard bottles clinking."

Howard stopped squinting just long enough to give her a look to tell her that any question she could have about the bottles was an extremely stupid one. Dekka snorted.

"What happened to your face?" she asked.

"Your stupid flashlight happened to my face. What's your face's excuse?"

Howard couldn't see Dekka's face enough to be sure, but he was fairly sure he'd managed to at least get an eye-roll out of her. Which was some small, meaningless victory on its own.

He also couldn't be sure that he saw a sympathetic crinkle between her eyebrows when she asked "you sure everything's okay in there?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Do you just sit around in the dark waiting to spring people with your flashlight?"

"I'm trying to be nice."

"No, you're getting in my face. Are we done here, officer?"

Dekka grunted and lowered the flashlight before turning and walking away. Her booted feet made crunching noises over the pine needles.

Howard gave her a little wave that was lost in the night. "Night night, Dekka! Don't let the bed bugs bite!"

He didn't get to see how much the remark hit home, because she snapped the flashlight off entirely, leaving him in darkness.


	2. Breath

**Breath**

-/-

-/-

"Nothing fuels a good flirtation like need and anger and desperation." –Aimee Mann, _The Moth_

-/-

"I don't like this," he said. "I don't like this even a little."

"You act like you never had booze before."

"Two sips of wine at a family reunion don't count, Orc."

"Yeah, no shit it don't count."

Orc stood over Howard and waved a hand over his friend's upturned face. Howard pushed it away with a newfound lack of coordination. He ended up with his wrist resting on his mouth. After a few moments of careful consideration, not to mention ten seconds of psyching himself up to move, he bumped his arm up so he was covering his eyes. "Don't do that."

"Lightweight."

"Shut up."

"If you need to chuck, just don't do it on me."

Howard considered that possibility. He felt like he swallowed something acidic and wiry, something that had smelled suspiciously like the weird straightener shampoo his mother used, but as of yet he didn't feel nauseated, so long as he didn't move his head. "I'm good. I just don't like how it feels."

Somewhere in the distance a siren started blaring. Neither of them paid it any mind. A brush of wind was pulling in humidity from the sea; the result was that the playground smelled like salt, and that they'd had to bring their jackets even on a June night. Howard had lifted a bottle of Jack from his parent's liquor cabinet after Orc had expressed a burning desire to 'get smashed up good'.

Howard lay on his back on the playground structure, skin on clothing on the smoothed wood of the platform above the slide, that convenient intersection between the monkey bars, the rope ladder and the fast way down. He kept blinking like his eyelids were camera shutters, as if hitting some reset button on his line of sight to keep the stars from swimming around. No use – the alcohol had done a solid job unfixing them, and now they were less constellations than they were dust moats milling through his vision.

Clear night. Very clear night.

"This was such a bad idea." Howard closed his eyes and kept them that way for a few seconds. "I am so busted when I get home. "

"You could come to my place." Orc sat on the edge of the platform, tangling and untangling his legs in the rope ladder. He didn't even look buzzed, but his speech was a little bit slower and thicker than usual, like he was talking around a gob of spit webbed between his teeth.

"Man, no offense, but your house smells like old milk."

Orc laughed, because, Howard thought, it was an accurate descriptor. He was only able to pull it out of the ether because he'd spent a little bit too long thinking about why it was that he didn't like Orc's house, but 'it smells weird' was the best excuse he could come up with that wouldn't feel awkward to say out loud.

'I don't like your house because your mom always cringes when she smiles'. 'I don't like your house because your dad's a foot and a half taller than me'. 'I don't like your house because your dad makes me empty my pockets in front of him before I leave, like I'd ever be stupid enough to nick something from him'.

'It stinks'. Simple language Orc could understand and not get all sullen about.

"We could stay out here 'til the kids with cars come," Orc offered. "I could scare 'em off."

"Might be a good idea. I really don't want to move."

"What do you think they do out here?"

"I don't know. Probably like, drink and smoke and…whatever."

Orc grinned his stupid grin. Howard figured Orc was just happy that for once, Howard was slow and dopey enough for Orc to keep up, no problem. Sometimes Orc complained that Howard talked too fast, or talked about too many different things at once. Howard tried his best to keep a cap on it, but it was frustrating to dumb things down all the time.

He guessed that was the one good thing about this much alcohol. He didn't feel like he could do his motormouth routine if he tried.

Orc chuckled and swigged more of the whiskey. "I hear they come out here to fuck."

"That's bullshit. They'd get busted for public nudity or something."

"You don't got to be naked to fuck."

"You know what I mean."

"What's it like?" Orc asked slowly, deliberately, like this was a really important question and he wants to tell Howard exactly what his hypothesis was.

"What's what like? Sex?"

"Yeah."

"I wouldn't know. I never even been kissed."

"Seriously?"

"Orc, how long you known me? Would I lie to you?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

Howard heaved a sigh that he drew out too long, emptying his lungs down to the pits. "No, Orc, I don't lie to you. Not ever."

It was a lie, but Howard didn't know what good could possibly be gained from telling Orc that occasionally, he'd fudge the truth a little to make his best friend feel better about something. Feel smarter or more competent or flat-out wanted, which was apparently an emotion in short supply in the Merriman household.

"You ever wanted to kiss someone? See how it feels and all?"

Howard shook his head, very slowly and slightly, from side to side, eyes closed. "Are we still talking about this?"

The air was suddenly pushed up out of Howard's lungs as Orc pressed a hand down on his chest, then sat on him. Howard coughed, only to find that Orc's mouth was hovering over his, and under the drunken bleariness Orc's face betrayed a moment of indecision before descending into a kiss.

Howard couldn't tell if it was surprise, booze, breathlessness or the kiss itself that sent all the blood rushing up to his face and blooming in the sockets of his eyes. He did know that he never remembered having something fleshy and alive in his mouth before, something with teeth that clicked and dragged uncomfortably on his, something that tugged at his lips and tongue and tasted like the Jack and salt. He closed his eyes, taking in the foreign sensation, trying to find words to put to it so he could jar himself from feeling nothing but stunned.

Maybe if he'd been sober he'd have seen that lead-in coming – it's not like Orc was the most creative in finding ways to express what we wanted. Instead having his best friend sit on his stomach and mash faces with him had caught him by complete surprise. The shock of it clouded out everything else, the sudden tangle of protest and want nullified by confusion and the physicality of being that close to someone, that his chest and Orc's were breathing against each other, that Orc's exhalations were like smoke up Howard's nose.

"I need air," he choked out, turning his head to the side to break away from Orc's mouth. Orc nodded and got up on his knees, over Howard but keeping his weight off Howard's guts. For his part, Howard stayed where he was, gulping down deep lungfuls of the night and staring up at Orc.

"That felt weird," Orc said.

"Yeah." Howard nodded slightly, squinting as the alcohol in his brain made Orc's face slide a little on his head.

"Kinda disappointing." Orc got to his feet and went back to his spot at the edge of the rope ladder, staring out at the stoplight in front of the school as if nothing had just happened. Again, Howard didn't protest.


	3. Knife

**Knife**

-/-

-/-

"It's you, it's all for you, everything I do, and I tell you all the time that Heaven is a place on Earth where you tell me all the things you want to do." –Lana Del Rey, _Video Games_

-/-

Stupid kids had the audacity to kill themselves off Howard's product. Not that he blamed them, of course, but overdosing seemed like a remarkably convenient way for them to get out of paying him back for the moonshine and the uppers. Convenient for them, not so much for him. Given the gradual corrosion of his goodwill recently, he was willing to believe this particular drug addict, an eleven year-old named Gemma, had overdosed specifically to spite him, rather than by accident.

Howard wasn't a fan of dead bodies, but if he was going to arrive on a debt collection run only to find a still-warm corpse at his client's house, he wasn't going to leave everything as he found it. He went through her pockets, first, pulling a necklace and a handful of 'Bertos from her jacket. Not enough to pay him, not by nearly half, so he shook his head and kept looking for something to make this trip worthwhile.

He picked a razor out from the pocket of her shorts, noting the thin scars along her wrists, stark and straight like nicks on a windowpane. All the scars were old; this Gemma had replaced her previous coping mechanism with Howard's booze and drugs. He shook his head. "Not my problem you couldn't hold your liquor, kid."

He wrapped his hand in a towel and pushed her on her side. A flat knife was tucked into the waistband of her shorts. He extracted it, twisting his wrist so as to touch her bony lower back as little as possible. It was one thing to touch clothing; it was another thing to actually feel the dry, taut skin on a dead body. He weighed the knife, bit the tip of it, wiped it on his jeans, and tucked it through his belt loop.

Finally, he went through her cabinets, under her bed and through her closets. The search didn't yield much, just a mostly empty jar of jam and a two boxy plastic barbeque dipping sauce packets from Arby's. Howard opened one of the packets and with painstaking carefulness, scooped the sauce onto his finger and into his mouth. He ate slowly, reminding himself that this could be the last time he ever tasted barbeque sauce, and when he was done he cut the packet up with the knife so he could lick every centimeter of the interior.

"We're even," he told the body in the middle of the kitchen, slipping the second packet into his pocket. As he left, he used a fat red sharpie to mark a large X on the front door of the house. Someone else would investigate and dispose of the body eventually.

It was getting dark by the time he made it back to the house he and Orc shared. The block was empty, although this particular street usually was. No one else had the guts to live here. Even from a hundred yards away Howard could hear the screams from his basement.

"That zombie's really killing the real estate market," he said out loud, then attempted to force a chuckle at his own wit. It was no good. The wails from his house were already marching up his spine, leaving goose-bumps all the way up to his neck.

He frowned when he found that Orc wasn't in the living room or the bedroom. Typically Orc didn't deviate far from the couch to the pile of mattresses to the waste trench Howard had dug outside, but a peek out the window told Howard Orc wasn't there. Gritting his teeth, Howard grabbed a bottle of gin from the pantry and stormed out.

Orc was sitting on the back of an abandoned pickup a few doors down, just out of earshot of all but the loudest of Brittney's cries. It took Howard a whole ten minutes to find him.

"What the hell are you thinking leaving that thing alone in there?" Howard stomped up, although he was careful to stay outside of Orc's reach.

Orc didn't even look up. He seemed to be trying to dent his name into the bed of the pickup by jabbing it with his fingers.

"I said, what the hell are you-"

"I heard you, Howard."

Howard stopped for a second to process the unbelievable fact that Orc's voice was clear and sober. He hadn't remembered what that sounded like. It had been months.

"And?"

Orc heaved a sigh that seemed to rumble up from the base of his lungs. "I couldn't do it no more. Listening to that. Couldn't do it."

"Sure you can. You just need a little sauce to numb you up some."

Orc lifted his mammoth head to look at Howard. His one good eye was teary and red. Some kind of infection had left gunky discharge smeared to the bridge of his nose. "You don't get it, Howard. You get to leave the house. You go out on your runs and big meetings and all and I'm stuck listening to that. All day."

Howard barely restrained himself from sneering. "But that's your job. That's what the Council pays you for. That's what I pay you for."

Howard jumped back as Orc gripped the side of the pickup bed and ripped a hunk of metal off. Orc threw it, way into the air, and Howard couldn't keep track of how far it went before it disappeared. Maybe it went as far as the wall. He couldn't tell.

"I'm a kid," Orc yelled. "I'm thirteen fucking years old! I'm not supposed to have no job, and not a job listening to Brittney beg me to kill her, neither!"

"You're fourteen," Howard said quietly, as if that made even the remotest difference. His voice was silky now, the kind of affect one would take when talking to a wild dog. "And okay, okay. I get it. You're in a bad mood. Let's talk about that."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"You mean you don't want me to convince you I'm right."

Orc crunched the other side of the pickup in his fist, then sighed. "You're better at talking. I don't want to talk."

"Okay, so we don't talk." Howard took a few careful steps up to the pickup, like a deer to water, and climbed up to sit on the edge next to Orc. He held the gin out by the neck. "You want some to take the bite off? I unscrewed the top for you and everything."

"Don't want a drink."

"That's new."

"I thought you said we wasn't going to talk."

"Okay." Howard pulled a strip of fabric from his pocket, twisted it up and sucked on it. It was something Orsay had taught them all, before her death. Serious hikers did it. Moving your mouth over something would trick your stomach out of hunger. Didn't matter what it was, bubblegum or leather or another person's mouth. Sucking and chewing would keep the hunger pains dull and tolerable.

It also helped Howard think. He handed another piece of cloth to Orc, and for several minutes they sat in silence, each mulling fabric between their teeth and staring out at an evening sky they knew to be fake.

Howard flicked his finger over the knife in his belt loop. It was a good weapon. Not long, but if it was slipped between someone's ribs and twisted, or drawn across someone's throat, deadly enough.

"Maybe tomorrow we should visit Bette's grave," he said, sounding casual. "Pay our respects and all. It's been a while since you been."

Orc didn't respond, but a few minutes later, he took the bottle of gin and downed it in silence. Howard said nothing to that, but relaxed a fraction.

"Let's go home," Howard said.

Orc nodded.

Howard hopped off the pickup truck. He rummaged through his pockets and placed the barbeque sauce packet in Orc's palm. "I brought you something."

Without a word, Orc followed Howard back to the house and the screaming.


	4. Mouth

**Mouth**

-/-

-/-

"These feet were made for walking away, so why don't we use them?" –Matthew Good, _How It Goes_

-/-

It was such a brilliant and pathetic idea that Howard was shocked he hadn't thought of it earlier.

He sat on top of the toilet seat, nudging the little candle into position with the tips of his fingers. The bathroom window was cracked open, and the screen pushed out and abandoned somewhere in the yard outside; this left just enough room for the fat grey moths to come in. Every few minutes, one would descend to investigate the tiny flame below, and if Howard reacted quickly enough he could trap it against the windowpane. And if he did this for an hour, that many moths might even add up to a snack.

It wasn't like he had anything better to do. He couldn't sleep with the zombie making all that noise downstairs.

As he waited for his next winged victim, Howard hugged his knees to his chest and watched the sky outside. Pitch black, as it usually was at night ever since the power went out. Candles were a rare commodity, but he'd managed to trade some Advil to a kid for this one. Just Advil – all the stronger stuff was used up ages ago.

In the morning, he would turn fifteen. He didn't know exactly when, since his birth certificate was a county over and somewhere beyond the wall. He just knew it was in the morning, this next day in December, sometime around dawn, and that his mother always blamed his small stature on how he was a month early, as if he'd had any say in the whole affair.

Howard smacked his hand against the wall and trapped another moth. It was still wriggling and fluttering when he ate it. Howard made a mental note to kill it entirely first next time; he didn't like living things in his mouth. The moth shed pieces of its wings on his tongue, leaving a powdery, dusty film all over the inside of his teeth.

Fifteen. Fifteen, the magic number. He watched another moth crawl along the edge of the windowframe and thought about escape, and runaway trains, and falling asleep. He thought about birthday candles and what the ninth grade would have been like and how nobody really cared about the fact that Christmas was around the corner, because there was absolutely nothing anyone could find to celebrate, much less the birth of Jesus Christ.

But mostly he thought about escape.

He jerked his head up when he heard heavy scraping and thumping sounds from the first floor, rather than the basement. Orc, obviously. No one else quite sounded like a toppled statue being dragged over pavement when they got up to pee.

Howard snuffed his candle. The flame went out almost like it was responding to a switch. After a few moments to get used to the darkness, he got up and went to find Orc.

Orc was slumped over in the kitchen with a flashlight and a dusty, battered excuse for a frying pan, staring at his reflection in the dim surface.

"What are you doing?" Howard asked.

Orc didn't answer, so Howard continued. "Don't waste flashlight batteries like that."

"I puked on the bed again."

"Then sleep on the couch and I'll clean it up in the morning. Now stop wasting the flashlight."

Downstairs, Drake stopped yelling and Brittney started crying. Howard walked towards Orc, scuffing his feet along the ground to avoid tripping on anything, and gently pulled the flashlight away and turned it off.

"Come on. Let's get some sleep before Drake takes over again. You can use my bed if you want. I think it's broken anyway." Howard couldn't lift Orc – far from – but he groped in the dark for Orc's hand and tugged at him a little. Orc rose to his feet with a creak and a grind and standing by his side, Howard felt him sway in the darkness.

"Come on, big guy."

"Forgot how ugly I was," Orc said, apropos of nothing.

Howard paused, but he didn't lie. It had been a long time since he'd lied to Orc about anything more than the state of their liquor cabinet or where he was going when he needed to get out of the house. Now didn't seem like the right time to start that habit back up.

"That's a stupid thing to worry about right now."

In the dark, it would have been easy to forget the state of their little life now if not for the sobbing wafting up from downstairs. If not for the way Orc smelled like moonshine and vomit. If not for the cloying scales of the moth's wings still on Howard's tongue. Ugly could be put aside. The rest couldn't.

Orc didn't ask for a better response, but he didn't move when Howard tried to pull him over to the smaller bedroom either, the one without the bowed and cracked floor. Howard huffed a little, but Orc refused to take a single step forward. For a moment, Howard wondered if he'd passed out standing up, and was greeted with the uncomfortable hypothetical of what would happen if Orc were to topple forward onto him.

Well, Howard thought. That would be one way to get out of the FAYZ.

"Hey, man. It's okay." Howard stood up on tip-toes and reached a hand up to find Orc's face. His fingers brushed over the scratchy gravel of Orc's right side and found the patch of skin on Orc's left. Orc jerked his head back a little and then tilted it back down into Howard's hand.

Howard trailed his fingers over the puffy line of Orc's jaw, the chapped lips, the pockmarked skin that still managed to get acne, as if puberty were determined to hunt them down even at their lowest and inflict her petty miseries. He knew Orc could feel things on that little patch of skin more than he could anywhere else on his disgusting body. Just that skin, that flabby jaw, that gunk-covered eye and that overhang of a lip.

"Come on," he coaxed, continuing to pull Orc to the bedroom. This time, Orc followed. Their steps were slow, navigating around the bows of the floor and discarded items Howard had forgotten to clean up before the sun went down. Something in the body of the bed made a snapping noise as Orc collapsed into it.

"Hey, come on, on your stomach so you don't roll over on me." Howard fumbled around through the dark until he found the other side of the bed and tugged enough of the blankets from under Orc's arm to slip under. His hand searched for Orc's face again, and as he settled into the new slope of the broken furniture he rubbed his thumb, back and forth, over and over Orc's bottom lip. Compared to the rest of Orc's body, his mouth was soft. Sensitive. Even blistered and dry, there was something warm and smooth about it.

After several minutes of silence, Orc interrupted Howard's touching with a common question: "You got more food?"

Howard considered telling Orc about the moths in the bathroom, but decided against it. "We barely got enough artichoke for the two of us tomorrow. If we eat it tonight we go hungry."

"Maybe if we eat it another bird'll crash into the window tonight."

Howard's frown was lost somewhere in the darkness. "We can't count on that, man. It only happened once."

"So it's about time it happens again, right?"

Howard didn't have the energy to argue about probability and birds. "Just go to sleep. Artichoke in the morning."

"You think I'm ugly?"

Howard felt water under his fingertips. Tears or drool: either was a likely possibility.

"I don't know why you even care, Orc. Go to sleep. I'll be right behind you."

Howard felt a quick brush of air across his face, Orc sighing, and a tug at the pillowcase that told him even in the dark that Orc was nodding. Howard waited a few minutes and rolled over, wrapping his arms around a strip of blanket.

He wondered what would happen if he turned fifteen while asleep. It would make the decision easier, if he could just sleep now and wake up somewhere else, or not at all. If he never had to get up in the morning and split part of an artichoke and clean up vomit in the other room and spend however many more days until he died in this godforsaken bubble next to Orc. It could have been that tempting thought, or possibly just the knowledge that nightmares lived on the either side of consciousness, that kept him awake for nearly an hour after Orc started snoring.

He fell asleep and dreamed of trains, and a pair of shoes he could never keep tied long enough to walk out the door and go to school, and moths he was swallowing by the handful until his palms were covered in tiny flakes of their wings.

He woke up and it was still dark and he was still fourteen.

Sometime in the night, Orc had wrapped one of his hands around Howard's boney wrist. As delicately as if he were performing surgery, Howard disentangled himself; he could feel a bruise forming on his forearm, even if he couldn't see it, but there was nothing to be done about that. Orc made a little grunting noise when Howard got up off the bed, but otherwise didn't stir.

Howard walked to the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid, caught another moth and, less than an hour later, turned fifteen. A few minutes after that he walked back out of the bathroom, the taste of the moth on his teeth, and crawled back into bed, tuning out the sound of Drake waking up downstairs.


End file.
